Webinar 4 – March 26th

Webinar 4

“How can BBC Skillswise best support adults to learn maths and English in classrooms, as well as at workplaces, at home and in everyday life?”

Michael Rumbelow BBC

Date: Wednesday 26th March 2014

Time: 12-1pm GMT

”In the UK the adult basic skills sector is going through the most radical changes in a decade, as England moves from the decade-old Skills for Life framework – based largely on the national school curriculum and multiple choice tests – to functional skills – based on real-world situations and open-response assessments. Scotland continues to develop learner-focused, embedded approaches to adult literacies, and Wales and Northern Ireland are restructuring their national adult skills frameworks. At the same time the government has announced that apprenticeships are the ‘new norm’ for adults who don’t go to university and is raising the age of compulsory participation in education and training from 16 to 18, with a new requirement to continue working towards Level 2 maths and English.

BBC Learning is currently planning the next generation of Skillswise to support adult learners in this fast-changing environment, on a newly-launched, mobile and tablet-friendly BBC online platform.

In this Webinar BBC Skillswise producer Michael Rumbelow will talk about some of the learning theory and research the BBC is using to guide development of new numeracy resources – much of it sourced from ALM conferences and proceedings, as well as workshop sessions held at the BBC and trials with adult learners. He would also welcome any comments or suggestions on how the BBC can best support adult learners of mathematics with available technologies and in the current formal and informal learning environments in the UK.”

Michael is the producer on BBC Skillswise bbc.co.uk/skillswise, a set of online videos, games, quizzes, printables and more recently mobile phone tools to support adults learning maths and English. Skillswise is the most used online learning resource in adult literacy and numeracy classes in the UK.

Michael has worked for 12 years in BBC Learning, previously working on Bitesize, Primary languages, jam and Class clips. Before the BBC he worked as a secondary school maths teacher, an editor of online multimedia news at financial news service Bloomberg and as a journalist for computer games magazine Amiga User International.